Creativity Quote by Eddie Campbell

Getting fired never sounded so brisk. Eddie Campbell compresses an entire creative-industry saga into a deadpan anecdote: he “got the sack,” then casually corrects himself with the weirder, more telling detail - they paid him for eight issues and trashed three. It’s a punchline built from arithmetic, and the math is the point. In comics, where labor is serialized, deadlines are brutal, and payment structures can be opaque, numbers become the only hard evidence that something happened at all. Campbell uses them like a ledger of indignity.

The subtext is less bitterness than exposure. He’s not framing himself as a wronged genius; he’s showing how institutional indecision can erase work without ever having to argue about its quality. “They changed their minds about the direction” is the euphemism that creative managers reach for when they don’t want to admit panic, a new executive, a market wobble, or just taste-policing. The phrase makes the rejection sound strategic, even enlightened. “Threw three issues out the window” snaps that PR veneer in half: what’s described as direction is, to the maker, destruction.

There’s also a sly inversion of the usual exploitation narrative. They paid him. That’s almost the twist. Money doesn’t equal respect; compensation can coexist with discard. Campbell’s intent feels documentary: to normalize the messy, wasteful churn behind polished cultural products, and to remind you that “published” isn’t the only finish line - sometimes the real story is what gets quietly binned when someone higher up gets spooked.